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Monthly Archives: March 2017

Inspired by a three hour emission by Deutschlandfunk i started to research about Conrad Schnitzler. Paraphrasing the intro text:

A Long Night About Conrad Schnitzler
Sometimes even music comes out

By Beate and Stefan Becker

Chirping, bubbling, flickering: it sounds like factory sirens, sometimes like a chattering train. Intermedia artist Conrad Schnitzler mixes all these sounds into new music. As a craftsman without musical education, he becomes an important “sound worker” – and is regarded as one of the pioneers of the electronic music scene of the 1970s.

Conrad Schnitzler (1937 – 2011) was inspired by the new music from Cage to Stockhausen. In 1968 he opened the first underground club in Berlin with Zodiak as a space for happenings, theater and music performances.

Improvising with multiple devices is always useful for creating dynamic and complex atmospheres. After many months without playing with music devices this year I have started to jam again, playing with a mix of digital and analogue devices. Making music is an essential part of my creative life and I was distancing from it due to the other projects I have to handle at work and other pressures from professional life.

Fortunately I have been able to reconnect with the music practice. I created a mobile set-up at my home studio that I can arrange and disassemble pretty easy in a couple of minutes. I have been also recording the different sessions, and with less regularity, listening to them and finding excerpts and interesting pieces. I am uploading them to Soundcloud so they are easy to reproduce and stream online but I could also upload them to a server so they can be downloaded. It would be interesting to reactivate the sound of elektrodomestika and experiment with some collaborations across the Atlantic. I wonder what would be the best way to do that kind of creative exchange between music recorded in Boston and Berlin.

Below is a piece tentatively called Janus. It has already many layers of sound but perhaps can also be remixed again.